News has always been a tough nut for Communist dictators. It happens unexpectedly, giving bureaucrats precious little time to prepare the correct ideological explanation; it often undermines whatever propaganda line the state is pushing, and if it happens to involve embarrassing events like riots, strikes, accidents or outbreaks of disease, it can make the party bosses look less than perfect.

The Soviet Union dealt with the problem with the infamous Article 70 of the penal code, the most commonly used tool against dissidents, which basically defined anything the state didn't want people to hear as "anti- Soviet agitation and propaganda." Now China proposes to take the art of censorship a step higher with a bill that would severely fine media outlets if they report on "sudden events" without prior authorization.

"Sudden events" sounds awfully similar to what most of the world knows better as "breaking news," and in most countries it's regarded a core function of the news media. The trouble with suppressing reports of sudden events is that they usually emerge anyway, especially withe the rapid spread of the Internet, and then in a form even more damaging to the state. That was what happened when the Soviet Union tried to play down the Chernobyl disaster 20 years ago; China's cover-up of the SARS epidemic in 2003 only made the outbreak of the disease more severe, prompting the National Administration for the Protection of State Secrets to lift some of the controls over coverage of natural disasters. The new law would presumably put them right back.

The draft law says that newspapers, magazines, Web sites and television stations would face fines up to $12,500 each time they published information about a sudden event "without authorization." China may find, however, that nothing gives a story quite the cachet and credibility that censorship does. Billing a story as an "unauthorized sudden event" could become the Chinese equivalent of "banned in Boston" - a sure-fire way to draw even more attention to it.

A version of this article appears in print on June 28, 2006, in The International Herald Tribune. Today's Paper|Subscribe